Carts with lockable drawers are used for many applications. For example, a medical cart having lockable drawers is used to administer medication to patients in hospitals or other care facilities. A typical medical cart has casters located at the bottom of the cart to permit easy movement of the cart by attending nurses to various patients' rooms. The cart also has one or more drawers for storing patients' medicines. Typically, each drawer is dedicated to storing the medication for an individual patient. Because the cart is used to store medications for several patients and is movable from room to room, controlling access to the contents of the cart to prevent theft or misuse of medication, and thereby protect the patients is important. One such medical cart, as described above, is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,743,607 to Tuefel et al., which patent is commonly held by the Assignee of the present invention and hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Conventional medical carts have manually actuated locks which are operable to permit users to selectively lock and unlock the drawers of the cart to thereby control access to the contents stored in the drawers. Conventional medical carts have also been provided with electronically actuated locks, whereby the drawers of the cart are unlocked in an automated fashion after a user enters an access code into a keypad located on an external portion of the cart. When medical carts have been provided with both manual and electronically actuated lock mechanisms, these mechanisms have typically been provided as separate and independent systems, each individually capable of releasing the drawers of the cart from a locked condition. Because the manual and electronically actuated systems are separate, this necessarily adds to the overall complexity and cost of the carts.
There is thus a need for a simple cart locking system which overcomes drawbacks of the prior art such as those described above.